Sophia Ann Tappan (see also Toppan)

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Sophia Ann Tappan (also rendered Toppan) (1720–unknown), an 8× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth in colonial Massachusetts, her marriage to Joseph Brookings, her daughter Ellen Toppan Brookings, and the surrounding context of early eighteenth-century New England. Notable: the Tappan/Toppan surname carries an established New England lineage.

Sophia Ann Tappan, whose surname appears in the records under the variant spelling Toppan as well, was born in 1720 in the Province of Massachusetts Bay. The year and place of her death have not been preserved in the family record, though Massachusetts is understood to have remained her home country throughout her life.

She came into the world during a settled but still formative period of New England life. The Massachusetts of 1720 was a colony nearly a century removed from its Puritan founding, with Boston risen to prominence as one of the busiest ports of the British Atlantic. Towns along the Merrimack and the North Shore — the very country in which families bearing the Tappan and Toppan names had long been established — were knit together by Congregational meetinghouses, coastal trade, and an unbroken culture of literacy that the children of the colony, daughters as well as sons, generally shared. The variant spellings of her surname themselves bear witness to an age in which orthography had not yet been fixed, and a single household might be entered in the town books under more than one form.

Sophia married Joseph Brookings, joining her line to that family. Of their union, the family register preserves the name of a daughter, Ellen Toppan Brookings, born in 1745 and living until 1810. The persistence of the Toppan name as Ellen's middle name testifies to the regard in which Sophia's family was held and to the New England custom of carrying a mother's surname forward as a given name in the next generation.

Though the closing dates of Sophia's life remain unrecorded, her place in the lineage is firmly fixed. Sophia Ann Tappan was an eighth great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother line.